


this is my lot

by buckstiel



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Introspection, M/M, Relationship Study, Season 5 Act 2, Sensuality, Temptation, The Corruption, The Dark, The Desolation, The Stranger - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26959237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: On foils and love and sense of self in the time of the Eyepocalypse.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Elias Bouchard/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	this is my lot

**Author's Note:**

> i just think jon's relationships with martin and elias are interesting especially vis a vis each other. sue me!
> 
> unbeta'd. title from "another birth" by forough farrokhzad.

The first time it happens, they’re halfway through a domain of The Corruption, the first bit of claimed territory after emerging from Salesa’s bubble and that strange, terrible hospital. Doomed souls scurry around a large wooden structure as it creaks and groans overhead--it’s their dwelling, and it keeps out the apocalyptic elements, and rot snakes down its fibers. They mumble to themselves, confer with each other about the decay. They work diligently to scrape it all off and leave the wood looking fresh. 

Jon steps through their shifting crowds, hand tight in Martin’s grip, and--

The two of them are alone on a road. The grey is unmistakable, and the wood’s complaints are distant. Behind them. Jon stops, glances over his shoulder, turning back to find Martin’s eyebrows bunched together in a question. 

“What just happened?” Jon says.

“What do you mean ‘what just happened?’”

“We were in the domain, and then--” Something far off on the impossible horizon curves up toward the sky, a sickly shadow Jon instantly ties to some manifestation of The Hunt. It’s something to stare at, passively absorb while the rest of his head spins in place. “I didn’t make a statement.”

The angle of Martin’s brow shifts. _Concern_ \--that angle with that degree of furrow is _concern_ , subcategory _worried_ , supplied by his personal mental archive without seeking it out. 

“You did,” Martin says. “Do you not remember?”

“I…”

“It was about all the people trying to save that building before it falls and crushes them. I didn’t listen to all of it. Got a bit lengthy this time.”

Suddenly, he Knows. “They’re so concerned about the surface rot that they don’t see it’s infected to the core.” 

Martin smiles, but his eyebrows remain in place, heavy and fretting even as he cracks a joke about whether The Beholder needs an editor to cut down on fluff and get straight to the point. A couple jibes about Hemingway nudge their way in, and they’re trudging down the path again, hand in hand, as Jon shrugs the moment aside as nothing more than mentally shifting out of focus. 

It’s Salesa’s bubble, he insists to Martin. Sure, they slept for seventy-one hours, but for him it wasn’t exactly restful, cut off from his Entity. His spaciness can be forgiven. 

But it’s not spaciness. Jon Knows this just as certainly as he Knows where in the rolling grey hellscape of Britain where Basira has made her camp, or that a blister on Martin’s left heel is about to pull open red-raw, or exactly how Stonehenge was used by the ancient druids. The Eye affords him a memory as meticulously managed and searchable as a rolodex, and near the top of the stack are two chunks of empty, black nothing. 

The first, larger, belongs to Salesa, marked with a tab labeled “nice (?)” in Martin’s careful, looping script. 

The second bridges this latest gap. Outside, against the backdrop of eyes rolling across the sky like clouds, Martin is chattering about a poet he likes. Farrokhzad. Jon’s heard most of this before but he still nods along to the cadence of his voice. It’s comforting, as warm as the slim gap between the centers of their palms or the many cups of oolong left on his desk before everything spun so dreadfully out of control. 

It calms him as he flicks through each rolodex card one by one. Black. Black. Black. Every crunch of his soles against the chalky grey earth another card flits past. Until--

His heart catches in his throat, icy pressure against his windpipe. 

Elias. (Jonah.) A sneering grin over a perfectly-coiffed ascot. Dark emerald suit, impeccably pressed until the crease of his slacks is sharp enough to draw blood. And around his head, the glowing green wrap of a halo in the style of old Byzantine icons, pinpricks of pupils hovering around the tips of his ears, the smooth arc of his hair. One of his hands stretches up, out of the card, toward him. Beckoning. 

Jon flicks to the next card, and it’s black. Nothing. 

He’s fine. It was nothing. 

Martin’s focus still circles the poet--the poet and the knuckle of Jon’s first finger, which he traces back and forth with his thumb. The translated collection of her work he used to own, Martin notes, was named after a poem, _Sin_.

“It’s about, y’know… having sex,” he says. “Giving into desire everyone around you says is wrong and relishing it anyway.” He ducks his head, squeezes at Jon’s hand. “First time I read it, I was--um, closeted. Had just kissed another boy for the first time.”

Jon thinks about his own first, about Matthew and the quick, closed-mouth peck they shared hiding from the chaos of a classmate’s thirteenth birthday party--but not before he drifts back to the safe house, the hidden statement, watching the world crack open and the deluge of fear rushing into his lungs in a wave of pleasure that drowned out every attempt at physical intimacy over the course of his short life. Martin found him huddled on the ground not out of terror, but something else. Something far from it. Something he could not--and would not--admit. 

A pang of it blazes to the surface of his skin when his thoughts fall back to that freeze-frame of Elias. He buries it, tugs Martin to a stop and rises on his tip-toes to pull him into a kiss that’s all tongue, all breathless grappling and instinct. He loves Martin. He’s _in love_ with Martin, would risk anything for him, would die for him. 

The Eye, pressed against the inside of his forehead, squints, suspicious; and Jon only buries himself further into the hold of Martin’s arms. He can’t hide here, but that’s beside the point. The point is that it’s the last place anyone will try to make him bleed.

This much he Knows.

*

The second time it happens, he sees it coming.

They’re among The Stranger, a labyrinth where the winding walls are lined with the lost, embracing--as Jon Knows--a loved one, their most beloved. A parent, a partner, a friend. It doesn’t matter the relation; their smiles wrap up to the corners of their eyes, they murmur nothing but love to those holding onto them in desperation, all while plunging silver-sharp knives into their backs. 

The walls of the labyrinth, then, are red. Sticky and slick and trembling. Martin grips Jon’s hand harder and tugs him along, and suddenly there’s a low, tense whistle whirling around Jon’s ears--not _his_ ears, but something close to it afforded by The Eye, a gale blowing everything else away until his normal vision blots out to black. 

Martin’s hand, his anchor, is gone. He stares down at his own hands, ropy with scar tissue, at his muddy shoes standing on a solid ground of nothing. When he glances up, the first thing he notices before him is the halo. 

“I lost track of you for a moment there.” Elias. (Jonah.) Just as he looked in the rolodex, but the glow around his eyes and up to the piercing gazes of the halo burns, the searing kind of heat that hits the skin as something closer to ice. 

It should hurt. Jon knows this, but he Knows also that it was never going to. That it can’t. Martin or Basira would have crumpled under the weight of it, but Jon finds his tired muscles strangely bolstered.

“Knew you couldn’t stay away.” Elias saunters forward, slow but deliberate, until he’s half a step from just too close. 

Jon hates it. He can smell the tangy posh aroma of his cologne, can count the delicate threads of his waistcoat. He can hear his own heartbeat too, under his ribs, how the tempo is the same calm afforded by the Admiral purring in his lap or Martin running fingers through his hair. This he hates even more, even as he senses his eyes flutter shut with it. 

“This isn’t going to end well for you,” Jon murmurs. 

“Oh?” The smirk is audible. “Do tell.” 

He’s seen in a way that drills down to the marrow of his bones and the finicky jumping train of his thoughts, the untraceable lines from neuron to neuron; and yet the fear isn’t there. Elias grips his jaw with those slender fingers and runs his thumb over Jon’s bottom lip, tugging it along with the friction. 

There’s no fear. He’s the Archivist. The Archive. And Elias--Jonah--whoever, he’s the keeper of it all. A name hasn’t been given to the place he occupies under The Beholder’s gaze, and Jon can’t unearth it with the usual amount of certainty, yet it comes to him all the same. Curator. The one who picks and chooses what to display from the catalog, who keeps the hidden, sheltered things in pristine condition all the same. 

“I’m not letting the world remain this way,” Jon says.

“You like it, though. Don’t you?” 

At this, Jon opens his eyes. The glow of Elias’ halo extends into his pupils, a darker green shimmering where there should only be black. The fear doesn’t rise here, either, not even when Jon feels his heart curl in on itself, knowing all the agony of the world is at his disposal and running through his veins like a potent dose of heroin. 

He likes it, yes, and it rips him apart. Watching Basira put a bullet between Daisy’s eyes. (His mouth goes dry with how desperate he was to watch her dispose of the body.) Watching Martin talk hazy circles around himself. (He will never forgive himself for the high that lit up his nerves as The Lonely stalked him again, stoked the glowing embers of Martin’s self-hatred that Jon had tried so fervently to extinguish.) 

“Get your hands off me.”

“That’s not a denial.” Elias’ thumb comes to the center of Jon’s lip, tugs down until it pulls free with a quiet _pop_. “You’ve never been a good liar, Archivist. You’re never going to be able to deny it.”

Elias--or the image of him, whichever--pulls back into the dark, the borders of him fuzzing even as his fingers linger on Jon’s chin, drawing out the contact. All at once, Jon’s heart rockets painfully against his ribs like it’s planning an escape; the scene of The Stranger fades back into focus. 

His knapsack, tugged around to his front, is half unzipped. A tape recorder sits at the top of his wrinkled mess of clothes and supplies, and his hand hovers just above, just in front of Martin’s patient, waiting, beautiful face; and beyond him lies the end of the bloody maze of betrayal. 

“You’re done then?” Martin asks like he’s already repeated himself a few times.

“Yes, yes…” He zips up the back, flings it around to his back so he can stick his other arm through the strap, and in that single motion he reaches for Martin’s hand. Squeezes until the thin bones of his fingers shoot pain up his arm, and he tries not to meet Martin’s questioning glance as they leave the domain behind them.

He says, with purpose, “I love you”--because it’s true. Jon’s only loved two people in his life like this, Georgie and Martin, and something about this time around, the hand held bright in his amid the unrelenting horror, turns him upside down in a way he can only call singular. 

(Not that uni wasn’t full of its own horror, on its own terms. Navigating the sense of your own personhood just takes on a different flavor when the sky has pupils dilating with your every move. When you’ve long accepted that “personhood” probably isn’t the right word for what you’ve become, but it’s the closest one you have.)

Martin says, “I love you too,” and his silent questions don’t melt away, though they do sag. There’s a drip, a loss of mass, but not quickly enough to really matter. 

They walk in silence for a few moments. “After we get through all this,” Jon says suddenly, “and the world’s back to normal--and, I know, let’s just… forget what I’ve said before about--so _hypothetically_ \--”

“Go on, I get what you’re saying!” And Martin laughs. It’s short, half-swallowed, but still counts in Jon’s book.

“What would be the first thing you’d do?”

The grin Martin’s laughter left in its wake fades as he holds the question before him. “Oh. Hm. Well… what would you do?”

“I asked you first.”

He nods, squeezes Jon’s hand on some absent instinct. “Let me think about it for a bit.”

He hadn’t meant anything serious by the question, and Martin knows this, and Martin also knows that he Knows this, so Jon holds his tongue. Lately, he’s found it useful to be somewhat literal in that respect--he presses his front teeth down until there’s less give than warning ticks of pain, and the torrent of useless words remains in the unsorted jumble in his head. 

There’s the quiet, the crunch of their footsteps along the dirt, the warmth of Martin’s hand in his. If he concentrates, that’s all there is. He can ignore the pleasant rush of goosebumps crawling up his arms when he meets the gaze of the Panopticon.

*

The third time it happens, he wishes he could say that he wasn’t surprised--but if his time as Head Archivist taught him anything, it’s that he could stand to be a faster learner.

The Dark isn’t subtle when it comes to stake its claim; once over the threshold, even Jon’s supernatural sense of sight struggles to discern what’s around them, all shadows and figures with wispy, shifting borders. The eyes in his head, the normal ones, sit useless, straining against a nothingness so jet-black and dense and _close_ that he wonders if the Entities can learn from each other, if this place has cribbed notes from The Buried.

“Come _on_ , Jon, if you don’t get a move on, it’s not going to end up well for us--”

“What’s the matter?”

“Do you not see what’s going on?”

“I--no? We’re in the realm of The--”

A statement. It’s time to make a statement. It hits him like the clawing yen for a cigarette during that first attempt to quit, and he tugs Martin to a halt. His protests curl and stretch in the air, soupy. Indiscernible. His hand roots around frantically in his knapsack as soon as he can pull open the zipper, and he fights the trembling in his limbs anticipating the second his thumb hits play--

_Click._

He can see. His knees no longer quaver like jelly as the heady rush rolls over his whole body. He could live like this forever in this haze, all of creation available to him, wrapped around the inside of his skull in a constant feed. 

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Extraordinary.” 

His Eyes pluck out a moment from dark fog, pull it into closer focus: Martin, clutching at the elbow of Jon’s physical body, fighting back tears all while Jon intones into the tape recorder. The expression on his face, his own face, renders him near-unrecognizable. A grin far toothier he’d ever allowed himself, an edge of malice to his stare that, at some distant, separate era of his life, he’d considered alien to his very person. 

Martin is so scared. He sees it, realizes on some level he should be concerned. Here, though--here it slakes a thirst he wasn’t aware was out to shrivel himself up from the inside. 

Jon watches him. 

“He looks good like this.” 

“Yes,” Jon says, and then he feels the bony hand creeping along his collarbone. 

His gaze snaps back to the here and now, fingers latching around that wrist and tugging it away from his chest. The movement only pulls the body it’s attached to closer, until it’s flush with Jon’s back. 

“Dear Archive,” Elias says, chin coming to rest on Jon’s shoulder. “What’s on your mind?”

It’s a useless question--Elias doesn’t need Jon to answer in order to know. They both see the fantasy unraveling in Jon’s head, the image of Martin quaking under the weight of his own fear while Jon sits before him on his knees, reverent. Watching. Coming apart in a way he knows he’ll never be able to give Martin otherwise. 

See, it’s an exchange in its own way.

“I don’t know if I’d call it that,” Elias says. 

“Get out of my head.”

“How much of it is _yours_ , Archive? Just yours? Not taken up by the clutter of others’ fears, or…” Elias’ other hand drifts toward Jon’s temple, presses the pad of his middle finger against the fragile spot of bone. 

Plucked out of the files of his brain is the moment before Elias tossed him into The Lonely after Peter and Martin. The simple question, the admission of terror. Jon sees his own face, the knotted waves of his graying hair before they’d cut it in Scotland dark around his eyes, shining with all the possible ways he could find Martin lost to him forever. Jon sees himself, and for once the memory doesn’t coil his stomach into a bright surge of nausea. For once he can consider all the scenarios that were tumbling through his thoughts without wondering if his legs were going to buckle in an attempt to protect him, hold him back. 

He likes himself like this. He likes himself--for once.

“This is one of my favorites,” Elias says close in his ear. “I like to revisit it when the world is too terrified to let me sleep.” 

The first question that crops up in Jon’s head isn’t what Elias does with the memory, but rather--“You can sleep here?”

“‘Sleep’ maybe isn’t the right word for it, but I can. And so can you, if you let yourself sink into everything around you.” 

Elias hasn’t moved, letting his body drape over Jon’s--a hand at his temple, a chin tucked into his neck, fingers curling around his wrist held away from the heart that somehow keeps on beneath his ribcage, that he can’t feel under Elias’ pressed against his back. 

“The pain and suffering still bother me.”

“The pain and suffering bother _Martin_ ,” Elias says. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” He doesn’t mean to say it out loud, but it comes through anyway, louder and more solid than if Elias simply plucked the thought as it drifted and curled out of his forehead. And maybe that matters, because all the holds Elias had on his body vanish, chilled with his absence. 

A pressure like a stiff handprint flings him back toward the material plane, back into the darkness where Martin’s thick arms squeeze Jon’s elbow into numbness. The pressure renders that hand numb and cold, but it’s Martin’s face at the other end of it this time. The dark’s started to let up with the tape recorder clicked off and tucked away in Jon’s jacket pocket; he sees the hazy, gray outline of Martin’s face, traces the hills of his lush cheeks with his thumbs, lets apologies tumble over his lips like a waterfall. 

_I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you_.

“Jon--” Martin swoops into a heavy, closed-mouth kiss. “Let’s just get out of here, okay?” 

Martin hates the dark--the fact leaks through into Jon’s head without warning, without him digging for it. Martin hates the dark, but he hates the near-dark even more, the kind where you can see enough of what’s circling you to be scared, but not enough to be anything else. The nugget of fear lands with a pleasant thud into Jon’s stomach but he still takes Martin’s hand, murmurs reassurance, and leads them on the shortest path back to the normal gray haze of the end times. There are still choices to be made. One’s direction can’t simply be boiled down to _left or right_ when there’s a whole three hundred sixty degrees to face. 

The edge of The Dark’s domain is sharp; they still give it an extra ten feet of distance before they let themselves collapse, lest it decide to lash out. 

“Are you all right?” Martin asks after a moment.

“I should be asking you that.”

“So I got there first. Humor me.” There’s a laugh in his words, ducking behind a corner, but Jon can still spot its footprints. 

(He thinks back to the last domain of The End, all the tombs leering over them, their abbreviated game of I Spy. Martin’s laughter there was so jarringly out of place, some buoyant force to guide them further down the path to London without any more of the grimy river leaking into their mouths. A supernatural shot of adrenaline.)

Jon sighs. He tries to let it be a simple sigh, something he can pass off as a take at breathing after getting though yet another domain. Even that is lying, and lying to Martin is something he can’t get through without something angry clawing at his insides. 

“I… I just have so many questions.”

“Suppose that’s natural for you,” Martin says.

“Yes,” Jon murmurs, turning their clasped hands over so he can focus his attention on the light splatter of freckles along Martin’s knuckles. “It’s… back with Breekon--you said I was the closest there was to a god in--in all this. What does that make El--Jo--you know, whoever he is?”

Watching Martin think is as indulgent as the richest chocolate cake--his internal monologue twists across his face, lips moving in a silent conversation with himself as his gaze is an entire plane away, drawing out the logic. It’s enough to make Jon dig his heel into The Eye’s basest impulses. He wants to watch it unfold in the scrunch of his nose, the spots his teeth chew against the inside of his mouth. Part of Jon knows that he could learn to read this deliberation, follow along, but it’s enough to observe. It’s Martin being Martin; what else could he possibly need?

“I think,” Martin says finally, “that it makes Jonah a fool.”

Even in a world where every iota of knowledge is afforded to him, it turns out Jon can still be surprised.

*

It’s some time before they pass through another domain; after their stint in The Dark was a patch of dense fog reeking of The Lonely, and while Jon can’t predict the future, he can recognize precedent well enough. He steers clear of the fog, of a tract that reminds him too much of Mr. Spider, of another domain which, like the hospital, has too many Entities’ fingers in the mix to be neatly labeled, but features a nasty cadre of mothers. 

Eventually, though, Jon feels himself grow hungry, and he can’t find fault with the latest domain of The Desolation to steer them away. 

He expects to find rolling hills of flame but instead they stumble into a waiting room laden with the numb gaze of bureaucracy. In the corners, some lost souls pour over the documents gripped tightly in their hands, stifling their sobbing. The room smells medically sterile. All the accents of the desk clerks are monotone with apathy. American.

The statement presents itself--it was sitting between two despondent figures, flipping through a year-old gossip rag before standing, making its way toward them. Jon reaches for the tape recorder tucked into his jacket. The hand held by Martin squeezes, and he knows he reaches for the thick plastic button but he doesn’t feel the _click_ under his thumb this time. This time Elias steps forward first. The rest of the scene collapses around them in a sloshing puddle, black and heavy. 

‘Who are you here?” He says it so quickly that his tongue trips over himself and a shining glob of spittle lands on the perfect knot of Elias’ necktie. 

“Why,” Elias says with the hint of a laugh, “Who do you think? I lord over everything the all-seeing sky touches.”

“Are you absolutely certain?” Jon’s Eyes flare open, and he swears Elias nearly cowers under the weight of their stares. 

There’s the near-cowering, then the unrolling of his spine into something tall and proud, and the glow of Elias’ eyes and halo cast a glare that makes Jon flinch. 

“You want to end me?” Elias says. “You want to stop me from pursuing whatever conclusion I’m after? Look at me, Archive. Really look at me. Can you say we’re not after the same things?” 

Of course there’s part of Jon that likes the world as it is--it’s the part of him that breathes in the stale, sour fear in the air like it’s grandmother’s chicken korma, but it’s a small part. It’s the part of him that pulls and grates against his insides whenever he breathes. 

“Bold of you to assume we’re on the same side, given everything,” Jon says.

“Is it?”

Two words, and a surge of rage flashes up his skin. _A god_ , Martin called him close to a god, so maybe--

“Ceaseless Watcher, hear my call--look upon…” 

His voice dies in his throat at the scene before him--Elias’ face splits open, folding to reveal a single, enormous eye sitting atop his neck, swiveling to gain its bearings. There’s nothing to let it blink as it aimlessly rolls in place, the pupil finally settling on Jon. Even without any of the other trappings of a normal face, Jon feels the smirk there, curling under the border of the dark green iris. 

“Who did you think was the Ceaseless Watcher? The Beholder itself?” Even without a visible mouth, Elias’ voice and laughter echo in Jon’s head. 

And all at once Jon Knows he’s not lying. He’s being more truthful than he ever has been--the Ceaseless Watcher wears the Watcher’s Crown, the Ceaseless Watcher lends the power when the Archive decides to strike someone from the record. The Archive gladly stores what the Ceaseless Watcher saps up from the pained, writhing world around them. 

_Two parts of a whole._

It should terrify him, that idea; but Jon can’t define his relationship to fear in a single, pithy statement. The fear sloughing off those around him, it keeps his limbs moving and his mind coherent. It lights a glowing satisfaction that roils under his skin. The fear of those he loves adds a tinge of self-disgust in the aftertaste. His own fear--he knows it’s there, but doesn’t Know it like he Knows so much else. It sits like a rotting appendix waiting to burst. It pangs when Martin’s hands shake, when there’s a knife held to the spot on his neck where Jon Knows to work his teeth just right, when fog creeps up behind his glasses and threatens to drown him. 

Jon steps forward, a tentative single step toward Elias, whose hand stretches out like that first blip of a memory left in his mental rolodex. 

(What does fear become when it’s burned and burned and burned, when there’s nothing left to feed it? What shape does it settle into?)

“You were calling upon me this whole time,” Elias mouthlessly says. His hand is deceptively warm when Jon takes it. “It was nice, wasn’t it, having all that power? Finally taking revenge on those who had wronged you?” 

(Jon suspects it settles into resignation.)

“It was,” he says, and when he glances up to meet Elias’ eye, he finds the skin crawling back over the eye, stitching back together until everything has returned to its rightful place. “But how are you so certain that you’re not on that list?”

A knowing smirk tics at the corner of his mouth. He holds up the hand holding Jon’s, runs his long fingers across the ropes of scar tissue. “How easily you forget our places here.”

But it’s not that Jon forgot--he knows, and he Knows, and he’s got so much practice in finding the objectionable parts of himself and digging knuckles in deep enough to bloom a rainbow of bruises. The power is nice. The power is evil. The power keeps Martin’s blood pumping through his body and his eyes bright with life. The power makes his hand in Elias’ feel like he’s finally been slotted into his proper place in the universe, and maybe he’s tired of existing otherwise.

“Yes,” Elias murmurs. He takes Jon’s other hand. “You understand.” Slowly, he dips his head down, presses his lips against the soft skin behind Jon’s ear, and Jon hears himself sigh--goosebumps race up his arms as an image rises in his head, a still shot of sobbing woman back in the Desolation’s waiting room, penciling desperate calculations in the margins of an invoice. 

The image shifts--he sees Martin beside her, he sees him take her hand, murmuring encouragement and then, quite suddenly, pointing out some issue in her math that allows her to catch her breath. Maybe it’s possible, Martin is saying. Maybe not all is lost.

Beholder above, Jon adores him. 

Elias pulls back, only enough that he can glance down at Jon’s mouth, the scars puckering against his cheekbones. “What is the Ceaseless Watcher without an Archive?” He leans in--

Jon steps back, pulls his hands free. “You’re going to have to find out.” 

Squeezing his eyes shut, he wills himself back to his body, fists clenched hard enough to prick blood from his palms; and after a short rush of wind in his ears, the unmistakable squelch of denim on vinyl signals his return. He opens his eyes, and Martin is there, sitting beside the woman in his head. He’s got his phone out now, dwindling down what’s left of the battery with the calculator app. 

“Martin.”

“Oh--Jon! You’re done!” 

Jon could stare into that smile of his forever.

“I--yes. Are you?”

And Martin glances at the woman. Her grin is sad, but she pats his hand all the same, gives him the nod to go on. Of course in the world they’re in, problems can’t be sorted through sifting through the bad math. Going back to carry the one won’t keep the wills of an avatar from breathing down your neck. There’s something to be said, though, for the connection.

“Yeah,” Martin says, and he gathers up their knapsacks, pulling Jon’s on for him as he stows the tape recorder back in his jacket. He offers Jon his hand. “Let’s go on, then.”

Outside of the waiting room is more of the same gray nothingness--various pockets of horror line the horizon, single domains or amalgamations Jon doesn’t let himself dig into, not now. Now, Jon focuses on the hold of Martin’s fingers between his, the idle chatter that’s arisen, circling a new favorite poet (O’Hara, or maybe Glück, or maybe both), and the peace that comes through all of it, the absence of fear when Martin stands beside him. The absence of the need to make himself bruise when Martin meets his eye and grins in reflex. 

_You can still be good_ , it says. _You can still be good despite what you think you are or what others made you become_.

Jon forces his Eyes shut. Martin is going on about a poem in particular, something by Glück. He doesn’t hear the exact words he’s saying, but he listens all the same to the familiar lilt. It sounds like love. It sounds like hope in a world that’s supposed to have forgotten the meaning of the word. 

“We’re going to win, you know,” Jon says suddenly. He doesn’t Know it, but there’s other kinds of knowledge. There’s the kind that sees itself reflected in the blush of Martin’s face, the confidence it has in their hands clasped together and the quiet hum between their mouths back in Scotland. 

Jon loves him; and this, above all else, keeps him human.


End file.
